Photography/Transcript
Transcript Moby is shown taking a picture with a digital camera. He is photographing Tim in a city park. Text reads: The Mysteries of Life with Tim and Moby. TIM: Come on, Moby. Take the picture already! MOBY: Beep! Moby approaches Tim and pats at his hair. TIM: My—my hair looks fine; just take the picture! A photograph of Tim with an angry expression and spiky hair appears. Tim holds up a letter and reads from it. TIM: Dear Tim and Moby, Can you tell me about photography? From, Margery. Photography is the art of taking pictures, or photographs. As you probably already know, we take pictures using cameras. A camera works by capturing light from the world around us so it can be made into a picture. Three cameras are shown: a small, modern one, a medium-sized one, and a large, old one. TIM: The first commercially available pictures were called daguerreotypes, which were printed on polished silver instead of paper! They were invented in 1839 by a French man named Louis J.M. Daguerre. A man with a large moustache is shown standing behind a camera on a tripod with a cloth covering its top. TIM: At that time, having your picture taken was a new and exciting concept, and it became popular very quickly. But the process was expensive, time-consuming, and difficult. The equipment that photographers needed for developing photographs was very cumbersome. A man and a woman are shown. The man is wearing a top hat, a bowtie, and an old-fashioned suit. The woman is wearing an old-fashioned pink gown. TIM: Also, a subject had to sit completely still for 60 seconds to be photographed successfully! The camera zooms in on the man and the woman, who blink and smile but then frown. A black-and-white photograph of them appears. TIM: In the late 1800s, photography was revolutionized by an American inventor named George Eastman, who developed a new process for capturing images on film instead of plates. MOBY: Beep! TIM: Yeah, photography became a lot easier. In 1900, the Eastman Kodak Company released the Brownie, a cheap box camera that everyone could use easily. The Brownie was groundbreaking—it let regular people capture everyday life in a whole new way. A camera in the shape of a cube is shown in someone’s hands. Next, a woman is shown photographing a girl and a dog outdoors with the same camera. TIM: Photography became an integral part of news coverage—in fact, the pictures that photojournalists took for newspapers and magazines became as important as the stories. A newspaper titled The Daily Paper is shown. The headline reads, “Train Robbery,” and a photograph of a train appears underneath. TIM: Often, news photos were far more memorable than the written stories they illustrated. Three magazines, all titled The News Magazine, drop into view. The first shows a picture of a footprint on the moon, the second shows a girl wearing a headscarf, and the third shows soldiers wading into thigh-high water. MOBY: Beep! TIM: Yeah, one little picture can have a really big impact. Photography has been a major influence as an art form, too. What started out as a curiosity now graces the walls of museums. From images of nature to portraiture, photography became one of the dominant arts of the 20th century. The camera pans over photographs hung on a wall: a mountain surrounded by trees, a close up of a crying woman’s eyes, Marilyn Monroe, and a horse-drawn carriage on a city street. TIM: These days, photographers using digital cameras can increase that impact by editing photos on a computer. Moby is shown using a computer to draw a bikini top on Tim’s shirtless chest in a digital photograph titled “Tim’s Vacation.” TIM: Hey! Well, taking a really good picture can be harder than it looks. It may seem like you’re just pushing a button, but photography is an art. You have to think about the image’s composition—that’s the way the parts of a photograph are arranged. Moby holds his camera up to his eyes. TIM: First, figure out what the main element of the photo is. Don’t just take a picture from the first angle you happen to see. A view from a camera sweeps over a sidewalk where a dog sits next to a fire hydrant and a street lamp. A first the camera sweeps past the dog and the hydrant, but then it moves back to center on them and zoom in. Moby tilts his camera from side to side, which makes the view of the dog and the hydrant tilt as well. TIM: If you can, try looking at it from other angles. Moby is shown kneeling to the left of the hydrant, facing the dog. TIM: Try to keep the picture simple; you don’t want lots of objects crowding out your main subject. And think about how you want to balance the elements in your photo. You don’t always want to put the main subject right in the middle because, you know, it can look kind of boring. The camera view of the dog and the hydrant pans to the left so the streetlamp is included. TIM: You can use a thing called the rule of thirds—that’s where you imagine the photo is divided into three equal thirds—and group key elements in the left or right third. The camera view is divided into thirds by two vertical lines. The rightmost third, containing the dog, is highlighted. TIM: Asymmetry, or unevenness, can make for a much more interesting picture. Try to put some contrast in your photo—light colors against dark backgrounds, and vice versa, generally look pretty good. A photograph of a cardboard box in front of a similarly colored wall is shown. Then another photograph of the box outside at night, with a dark sky behind it, is shown. TIM: And think about framing—that’s where you put something in the foreground or along the borders to indicate the picture’s setting. The camera view of the dog and the hydrant zooms out to reveal a tree on the left and a bench on the right. TIM: Finally, you may want to consider what statement you want to make with your photo. MOBY: Beep? TIM: Well, it could be anything, from a political statement to just “Look how pretty this flower is.” Moby takes a picture. MOBY: Beep! TIM: “That dog sure must have drunk a lot of water?” Yeah, I…I, I guess that’s a legitimate statement. Category:BrainPOP Transcripts Category:BrainPOP Arts & Music Transcripts